Pictures in Powell

Jenkins describes Moreland’s apartment: “The walls were hung with framed caricatures of dancers in Diaghilev’s early ballets, coloured pictures drawn by the Legat brothers, found by Moreland in a portfolio outside a second-hand book shop; Pavlova, Karsavina; Folkine; others, too whom I have forgotten.” [CCR 11/5]

The Legat brothers, ballet master Νikolaĭ Gustavovich Legat ( 1869-1937) and dancer Sergieĭ Gustavovich Legat (1875-1905) , were with the Marinsky ballet in St. Petersburg when they published Russian Ballet in Caricatures, a set of 93 drawings, about 1903.

Anna Pavlova caricature by Nicolai and Sergei Legat, 1902-1905

Tamara Karsavina
Caricature by Nikolai and Sergei Legat, 1902-1905

Michael Fokine Caricature by Nikolai and Sergei Legat, 1902-1905

We recall two earlier references to Russian ballet in Dance:  Lady Molly’s uninterest in Russian Ballet [ALM 158] referred to the  Ballets Russes founded by Serge Diaghilev in 1909. Nicolai Legat joined Diaghilev in Paris. The music, costumes, choreography, and stars of the Ballets Russes were another facet of the contribution of the Paris School to Modernism. Fokine not only danced but was the first of many famous choreographers encouraged by Diaghilev. Pavlova and Karsavina were among the best known ballerinas. Today, Pavlova’s name is enshrined in a dessert of meringue topped with fruit that was developed in New Zealand or Australia after she starred there with the Ballets Russes in 1926.  The white meringue was meant to evoke the skirt of Pavlova’s tutu and the topping, a melange of brightly colored fruit, was worthy of a Ballets Russes costume by Bakst, whom Jenkins imagined as clothier of Victor Emanuel II, when he saw the king’s portrait hanging in Foppa’s club [AW 152/145].

General Conyers makes some rambling reflections on Dogdene:

“Then there is the Veronese (see our post  Constable, Pepys, and Veronese at Dogdene). Geoffrey Sleaford has been advised to have it cleaned, but won’t hear of it. Young fellow called Smethyck told him. Smethyck saw our Van Troost and said it was certainly genuine.” [ALM 226/227]

Portrait of a Member of the Van der Mersch Family, Cornelis Troost, 1736
oil on panel, 29″ x 23″
Rijks Museum, Amsterdam

General Conyers is referring to a painting by Cornelis Troost (Dutch 1697-1750). Troost was one of the foremost Dutch painters of the eighteenth century. Living his entire life in Amsterdam, many of his early commissions were portraits. We show a portrait with a cello to honor General Conyers’ affinity for this instrument. Later Troost painted theater scenes and, during the 1740’s, many military subjects.

Jenkins meets Widermerpool at Lady Molly’s. Widermerpool is looking wan but revives when he starts to talk about an invitation to visit Dogdene. “The reflection seemed to give him strength. I thought of Pepys and the ‘great black maid’; and immediately Widmerpool’s resemblance to the existing portraits of the diarist became apparent. He had the same put-upon, bad-tempered expression. Only a full-bottomed wig was required to complete the picture.” [ALM 194/195]

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was an administrator of the Royal Navy and a member of Parliament during the reigns of Charles II and James II.  He is famous for the diary that he wrote from 1660 to 1669, first published in 1825, in which he gives a vivid account not only of his personal affairs but of the whole of London during the Restoration.  Powell was fascinated by this period of English history and wrote a book on John Aubrey, who like Pepys, is a major source on the intellectual and social history of the period. Aubrey and Pepys were well acquainted; both belonged to the Rota club, a London debating society.

This passage toward the end of ALM refers back to Powell’s pastiche of a Pepys’ diary entry early in ALM (see Constable, Pepys, and Veronese at Dogdene). Pepys wears a long (‘full-bottomed’) wig to match the seventeenth century fashion for men to keep their hair long. Wigs became popular in England when Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, bring the fashion from France, where he had been in exile. Pepys wrote in his diary:

“3rd September 1665: Up, and put on my coloured silk suit, very fine, and my new periwig, bought a good while since, but darst not wear it because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it. And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection? That it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.”

Portrait of Samuel Pepys
Engraved by T. Bragg for the 1825 edition of Pepys Diary
original portrait by Geoffrey Kneller

Kenneth Widmerpool lunching at his Club
Mark Boxer
cover illustration for At Lady Molly’s
Flamingo edition, 1984

Pepys is dour enough in his portrait, but our vision of Widermerpool is also informed by this caricature drawn by Mark Boxer, which appears on the cover of the Flamingo edition (1984) of ALM.

Dicky Umfraville talks about the artistic aspirations of his ex-wife, Lady Anne Stepney, but adds that he, himself, “Can’t tell a Sargent from a ‘Snaffles.’” (ATM p 181)

A snaffle is a common type of horse bit. ‘Snaffles’ was Charles Johnson Payne (1884-1967), who worked as a graphic artist during World War I but after the war, concentrated on prints of sports: hunting, polo, fishing, pig-sticking in India, racing. The example shown below, from a Lawrences Auctioneers catalog, shows some of Snaffles characteristics, like a penciled signature and a humorous caption. An impressed mark of a pair of interlocking snaffles, often part of his print borders, is reportedly present, but we cannot see it on this reproduction.

The Worst View in Europe
Snaffles
Color print, 16 x 26 in

Bus Horses in Jerusalem
John Singer Sargent, 1905
watercolor on paper, 16 X 21 in
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Isabella Stewart Gardner
John Singer Sargent, 1888
oil on canvas, 76 x 32 in.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was prolific, producing over 900 oils, over 2000 watercolors, and numerous drawings.  He was born in Florence to American parents, studied in Paris, and spent much of his life painting in London. His portraits of the rich and famous were in demand on both sides of the Atlantic. This portrait of one of his patrons, Isabella Stewart Gardner, showed so much flesh that her husband asked her not to display it publicly while he was alive. We have highlighted a watercolor of horses to show how his elegant realism contrasted with Snaffles’ jocularity.  Umfraville’s mot is the only mention of the Sargent in Dance, so we know nothing of Powell’s opinion of him. Rodin called him “the Van Dyck of our time;” (John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits, 1998, p 150), but others preferred the Modernism that figures so prominently in Dance rather than Sargent’s realism. Roger Fry called the work “wonderful indeed, but most wonderful that this wonderful performance should ever have been confused with that of an artist.” Ivan Kenneally, writing for an exhibit of Sargent watercolors at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, examines Sargent’s relation to Modernism and puts Fry’s put down to rest.

Visits to the Jeavons’ household help Nick begin to fill out his picture of Molly Jeavons:  “She might have the acquisitive instinct to capture from her first marriage (if that was indeed their provenance) such spoils  as the Wilson and the Greuze, while remaining wholly untouched by the intellectual emancipation, however skin-deep, of her generation:  the Russian Ballet: the painters of the Paris School:  novels and poetry of the period:  not even such a mournful haunt of the third-rate as the Celtic Twilight had played a part in her life.” [ALM 158/]

The Marketplace, Vitebsk
Marc Chagall, 1917
oil on canvas Oil on canvas; 26 x 38 in. (66.4 x 97.2 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

The Paris School alludes not so much to a style of art but to Paris’ role as the magnet for forward-thinking artists of every stripe during the first part of the 20th century, up until World War II.  In the period before World War I, which would be when Lady Molly was coming of age as the mistress of Dogdene, the Paris School would have included Picasso and Miro among its painters, Brancusi and Modigliani among its sculptors. It is Lady Molly’s immunity to so many new strains of art — Cubism, Surrealism, the magical realism of Chagall, the expressionism of Soutine, the elongated figures of Modigliani — that signals her lack of enthusiasm for art, despite the Wilson and Greuze on her walls.  We could show any number of the diverse output of the School of Paris, but we have chosen here an artist not actually mentioned in Dance.

William Butler Yeats
John Butler Yeats, Portrait of his son, W.B. Yeats; frontispiece to W.B. Yeats, Celtic Twilight, 1896

The Celtic Twilight refers to a renaissance of Irish literature focused on a revival of interest in Gaelic folklore and Irish nationalism at the end of the 19th century.  The name itself derives from William Butler Yeats’ 1893 collection of tales and poems entitled “The Celtic Twilight.” The Celtic Twilight also inspired a number of visual artists and an increased interest in older designs like the Celtic cross.  Jenkins is not alone in disparaging this movement; in Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce wrote of the “cultic twalette,” but it should be remarked that its luminaries include not only Yeats but Sean O’Casey, John Millington Synge, and George Bernard Shaw.

At Thrubworth, Jenkins sees a “full-length portrait by Lawrence, of an officer wearing the slung jacket of a hussar.”  Errigde explains that this is the “4^th Lord Erridge and 1^st Earl of Warminster,” a contemporary of the Duke of Wellington. [ALM 149/149]

Charles Vane-Stewart, The Third Marquess of Londonderry
Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1812
The National Portrait Gallery
oil on canvas, 57 X 46 in. photo in public domain from Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) was a portrait painter and president of the Royal Academy. His flattering portraits were in demand by the artistocracy. This portrait by Lawrence shows the Third Marquess of Londonderry in a hussar’s uniform. A very similar portrait, dated 1814, is in the National Gallery in London on loan from the executors of the late 9th Marquess of Londonderry. Lawrence charged more for more complex paintings, so the full-length portrayal and the detail of the hussar’s uniform showed the affluence or at least the extravagance of the Erridge’s ancestor.

Jenkins saw Mona as “like a strapping statue of Venus, conceived at a period when a touch of vulgarity had found its way into classical sculpture. “  [ALM 107/105 ]

Venus de Milo
Alexandros of Antioch
Between 130 and 100 BC
Marble
Louvre Museum
image public domain from Wikimedia Commons

Roman bronze statue of Venus
St. Albans Museum, UK

We have already seen how Quiggins thought contemporary sculptors might treat statuesque Mona. Now Jenkins is clearly not referring to the classic Venus de Milo but looking toward later visions of the goddess of love.

The thought of General Conyers playing his cello reminds Jenkins of “Dutch genre pictures, sentimental yet at the same time impressive, not only on account of their adroit recession and delicate colour tones, but also from the deep social conviction of the painter.” [ALM 72/69]

Rural Musicians
Adriaen van Ostade, ~1655
oil on panel, 15 X 12 in
Hermitage Museum
images in public domain from Wikimedia Commons

When Dutch painting flourished in the seventeenth century, painters commonly devoted themselves to scenes of everyday life, called genre paintings. Maybe Nick was thinking of something like this cellist in a painting by Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685).